The internet provides a versatile medium for advertising. An advantage of internet advertising over more traditional advertising (such as advertising on billboards or in newspapers or magazines) is more customized or personal advertising, even down to the level of individual users. More personalized advertising tends to be more effective than less personalized advertising, and personalized advertising tends to be more effective when the advertisements are specifically directed at users who are more likely to be interested in the advertisements. Such users are less likely to discard or ignore the advertisements, and as a result the advertisements are more likely to generate revenue. At the same time, more personalized advertising typically reduces advertising costs for advertisers, as the advertisements are usually delivered to fewer users.
Search engine advertisers may show ads to users of search engines on a cost-per-click basis. Advertisers may bid on one or more keywords, including groups of related keywords, which are referred to as advertisement groups. The keywords are pre-selected based on predictions of what terms may be used in queries. Advertisers may select keywords and then assign cost-per-click bids, ad copy, and click-through URLs to each of the keywords or to each of the advertisement groups. Users of the search engine may then enter a query into a search engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, Bing) and the search engine may match queries to keywords and display relevant ads to the users, sorting the ads based on cost-per-click bids, click-through rate, and a host of proprietary algorithms.
Advertisers participating in such an auction-based system may face the daunting challenge of managing and optimizing the ongoing bid process, for example, managing and optimizing bids for thousands or millions of keywords or groups of keywords (e.g., advertisement groups). Likewise, generating relevant keywords based on predictions is challenging. Furthermore, proactively writing advertisements that are relevant to particular keywords is difficult. As a result of these difficulties, keyword sets are generally limited, and ad copy is generic in that it does not differ much from keyword to keyword.